Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC.

Tara Zanardi, assistant professor of art history at Hunter College, will present the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, February 19, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. Her lecture is entitled “Porcelain Pleasures and the Allure of the East: Charles III and China,” with a reception to follow in the atrium.

“Tara Zanardi’s scholarly interests engage the art and visual culture of Spain and its global empire during the long eighteenth century,” said Christopher Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art.

Zanardi (PhD, University of Virginia) teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art that consider a wide range of topics—art and politics, the development of museums, national identities and cultural representations, fashion, gender, and global exchange.

She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals, including Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has received numerous prestigious fellowships. Her first book, Majismo and the Pictorial Construction of Elite Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Penn State University Press) will appear later this year.

Her new book project, titled Global Exchange and Tropical Play: Chinerìa in Spanish Visual and Material Culture, focuses on “the deployment of colonial exoticisms in Spain and its empire, attempting to understand in the political and artistic context why certain artistic choices were made and others avoided,” said Johns. Zanardi will explore the highly fashionable and “exotic” eighteenth-century decorative mode of chinoiserie in primarily two major sites, the royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez. It will be the first in-depth analysis of chinoiserie in Spanish interior design, textiles, and decorative arts.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East. For more information, call the department at 615.322.2831.